Introducing Soils in the On-Line Learning Environment.

At Washington State University (WSU), Soil Science 201: Soils: A Living System (SoilS 201) has been offered for undergraduates in a traditional classroom setting throughout the history of the university.  While, like many universities, WSU does work collaboratively with community colleges to articulate courses from a two year A.A. degree into our four year B.S., not every college offers a SoilS 201 type course and some do not meet the requirements for articulation.  To address this, we developed an on-line version of SoilS 201 that launched in the fall semester of 2009.  The course is an asynchronous on-line course offered using the Angel Learning Management System (LMS).  It involves a combination of recorded lectures, on-line discussion boards, and both individual and group activities.  To address high student numbers, the student population is divided into teams of 8 - 12 students (depending on enrollment), and the teams are maintained throughout the term.

Because SoilS 201 is one of the few truly on-line science courses that fulfills part of the undergraduate student core course requirements (UCORE) at WSU, the student population is very different from the traditional agriculture-based student population in the live version on campus.  In addition, students at both the main campus and branch campuses, as well as those enrolled in on-line degree programs, have taken the course.  This has lead to an interesting geographical diversity in the student population.

Designing and teaching a quality online course, especially a high-enrollment, science one, undeniably poses a variety of challenges.  This presentation will discuss how those challenges are met through the structure of the course, the array of tools developed for the course, changes in the activities made to best meet student needs, and some summary statistics about the student demographics.